Archive for December, 2011

Marty McFly is travelling back in time to 1982 now, three years before the movie was released. He is travelling in a … I don’t know… Chevy Volt? Doc Brown is incredulous upon hearing the name of the President of the United States. The odd thing about the “You know that new sound you’re looking for –” That’s been parodied by The Simpsons … The Family Guy apparently … Hot Tub Time Machine apparently used the same premise for a Black Eyed Peas song played anachronistically.

And, yes, I am finding that the 80s are the new 50s.

In 2042, Marty walks into a retro cafe that plays Lady Gaga ad naseum. Hoverboards are still the stuff of sci-fi.

Well, another day, another chance to look into the Ron Paul universe. Take it away, Prison de la Planet!

The assertion that Ron Paul is the not only the least conservative candidate in the 2012 GOP field, but also the most liberal is beyond ridiculous. In fact, Ron Paul is not only the most conservative candidate, he is officially the most conservative member of congress and more conservative than any senator or president, not only today but dating all the way back to 1937.

Geez Louise. That’s quite a rubric for a rather uninteresting item. Who’s number two, you might ask?

3319 GEORGIA D MCDONALD, LARRY 0.851

Hey! I know him. I think. Wasn’t he — yeah, the man… John Birch Society President. So, there you go… if you go ahead and define Larry McDonald as the mark of the John Birch Society… Ron Paul is to the right of the John Birch Society!

Though, the desire to assert this flies in the face of that “Destroying the Left — Right paradigm” idea that these guys are always talking about.

After being interrupted by Occupy protesters during a veterans rally in Des Moines, Iowa yesterday, Ron Paul praised the movement, compared it to the Tea Party and declared that he was the only GOP candidate who could bridge the two causes and instill real change in Washington.

Having said this, I will make one comment: it’s obvious to me that the Libertarian Party would be a lot bigger than it is now if its image were perceived as more libertarian and less libertine.

Damned Hippies!

I am bluntly surprised that I don’t see anything in the Prison Planet lineup of stories ripping the Mainstream Media Conspiracy for propping up the candidacy of Rick Santorum — who is the latest in the long line of Not Romneys to be said to “surge” in the polls for a possible Iowa victory. If he pulls something off, I get the feeling he will just be goddamned lucky to have been last in line — arbitrarily last in line, I might add — behind Bachmann, Perry, Caine, and Gingrich… and with just enough gumption to be the “Not Paul”.

I first noticed the “Santorum Surge” with a National Review post “Maybe it’s time to take a first look at Santorum”. And so it goes.

If I were advising the Paul campaign, I’d suggest a few other rules for their kiddie corps, such as hiding their dog-eared copies of Atlas Shrugged and learning to change the subject when voters ask about the candidate’s views on foreign policy. But in any event, it’s interesting, and a bit depressing, too see the experience of yesterday’s youthful lefties being put to the service of a cause in which both McCarthy and Dean would be thought of as among the Slavedrivers of Collectivism.

Five Occupy protesters were arrested Thursday outside the Iowa campaign headquarters of presidential contender Ron Paul as the group continued its protest against Republican candidates and President Obama.

History repeats itself as farce, don’t it?

Meanwhile, looking ahead to New Hampshire… The Free State Project will raise Paul to… a good second place, I’d say.
And Virginia, thank you wonkette: so this Super Tuesday they will be requiring voters to sign over their souls with a promise to support the eventual GOP nominee in the general election as a condition for being able to cast a ballot in the primary. Since the state has an open primary and Mitt Romney and Ron Paul were the only two candidates organized enough to qualifyAll right. You must vote in the general election for the winner of a contest pitting the two candidates that have the largest unfavorables in the Republican Party electorate.

So, to review the Republican Nominating Fight…
They’re all a bunch of nuts. Thank you.

This might be a preview of the themes a President Ron Paul will go in for his State of the Union Addresses.

You may not have much time left.Next year, or next month, the New Money could wipe you out — destroy everything you’ve worked and saved for — and leave your family destitute.It could happen any time. And I don’t mind telling you I’m scared. For myself, for my family, for my friends, for my country.We’ve seen a lot of financial tyrannies from Washington in this century. This one could take the cake. And popping out of the cake, with a big Surprise!, will be an IRS agent with an AK-47.

Hold on.

I uncovered the New Money plans during my last term in the U.S. Congress, and I held the ugly new bills in my hands. I can tell you — they made my skin crawl.

Yeah, I kind of like the old designs better myself.

Thank goodness, a patriotic American within the Federal Reserve told me about this financial Manhattan Project. But this time, the government wants to drop the bomb on us.To manufacture the New Money, the feds have built a colossal blockhouse in Ft. Worth, Texas, as ugly as it is evil. Designed in Stalin-style, guarded by KGB-level security, and full of three-color printing presses and spy device embedders, it belongs in Moscow, not Texas.Stage One of the New Money — microprinting and a polyester thread — was meant to lull us to sleep, before the knife fell. But the bureaucrats’ scheme went awry when the old Bureau of Engraving and Printing plant in Washington, D.C., couldn’t handle the new technology.They’ve fixed that now, and Stage Two will chill your blood.

“As Ugly as it is evil.” Well… y’know… for the purpose of dramatic storytelling you can’t have beautiful architecture home of evil doing.

I’ve been told not to talk, but these stooges don’t scare me. Threats or no threats, I’ve laid bare the coming race war in big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.)

Hm. In 1988, Ron had a hardcore Libertarian supporter, Jim Peron, Owner of Laissez Faire Books in San Francisco. Jim set up a magnificent 3-day campaign swing for us in the SF Bay Area. Jim was what you would call very openly Gay. But Ron thought the world of him. For 3 days we had a great time trouncing from one campaign event to another with Jim’s Gay lover. The atmosphere was simply jovial between the four of us. (As an aside we also met former Cong. Pete McCloskey during this campaign trip.) We used Jim’s home/office as a “base.” Ron pulled me aside the first time we went there, and specifically instructed me to find an excuse to excuse him to a local fast food restaurant so that he could use the bathroom. He told me very clearly, that although he liked Jim, he did not wish to use his bathroom facilities. I chided him a bit, but he sternly reacted, as he often did to me, Eric, just do what I say. Perhaps “sternly” is an understatement. Ron looked at me directly, and with a very angry look in his eye, and shouted under his breath: “Just do what I say NOW.” […]Again, let me stress. I would not categorize that as “homo-phobic,” but rather just unsettled by being around gays personally.Hm.

Anyway… back to all that other crap.

The Bohemian Grove — perverted, pagan playground of the powerful. Skull & Bones: the demonic fraternity that includes George Bush and leftist Senator John Kerry, Congress’s Mr. New Honey. The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica. And the Soviet-style “smartcard” the Justice Department has in mind for you.

Those who act decisively — and have the right information to act on — will survive the New Money and big government’s other economic calamities. In fact, history shows that bad times offer the greatest profit opportunities.A liberal clergyman sneered: “Isn’t it immoral to benefit from catastrophe?” I told him, “No, not if you didn’t cause it.” In fact, the few who preserve and even increase their wealth in the coming chaos will be needed to rebuild America.

I suppose it’s hear that I have to ask… given that we’ve had what, I guess(?) is the Great Catastrophe and Big Economic Calamity… have the Ron Paul Investor profited and are they rebuilding America as we speak?

Surviving the New Money, the Ron Paul Investment Letter and the Ron Paul Political Report will be your survival kit, and if you act now, you can get this $224 value for just $99 — 55% off!

The scene is preceded by an image of of a building that’s been converted into a “United World Temple” emblazoned with UN flags, and immediately followed by images of soldiers and guerillas fighting in the streets.This is exactly what you’d expect from the John Birch Society, an organization that has spent four decades urging the United States to leave the United Nations. It’s not what you’d expect from a serious Republican presidential candidate. It’s not even the kind of language you tend to hear from Paul on the campaign trail, where he’s more likely to talk about raw milk than the New World Order. And that’s been Paul’s best defense; the newsletters just don’t sound like anything he’s ever said. That’s partially true, but in the last few days, we’ve seen a clip (from 1990) of Paul embracing the idea that the Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations are secretly running the country, and now this. Josh Marshall reminds us, meanwhile, that back in September, Paul said that the border fence might actually be used to keep Americans penned in. Setting the racist articles aside, Paul really did endorse some of the more out-there arguments in his newsletters.

What? You think that the John Birch Society and the realm of conspiracnoia took after him in a vacuum?
This is something like the tip of the iceberg.

“I disavow those positions,” he said in the interview. “They’re not my positions, and anybody who knows me, they’ve never heard a word of it.”

Ron Paul. At least he’s a fascinating politician — unlike the most of the other ones.
And, sure, I believe that he didn’t write the solicitation letter, signed by him and employed with the first person pronoun and promoting “Ron Paul” brand items. Yet…

There are a few take-aways from this New Yorker piece. One, I already knew this, but some of the key big name figures of the “Civil Archipelago” aren’t entirely sympathetic. Like, Reformist for the Kleptocracy of the 1990s as opposed to the Putin era. This is somewhat typical — I always need to note that the presidential candidate for Iran’s “Green Revolution” was a project of the Iranian Revolution.

The more interesting of the movements … “Civil Archipelago” as David Remnick terms it… is kind of aburdly… well, .

The streets—the highways, the boulevards, and the crooked lanes of Moscow—are, in fact, one of the unlikely stages of civil protest in Putin’s Russia. Kutuzovsky Prospect is one of the main avenues on which government officials and the super-rich commute between the center of town and the multimillion-dollar estates of Rublyovka. Out in those monied woods are exquisite restaurants, spas, and showrooms for Bentley, Ferrari, Mercedes, and Maserati. Traffic is horrendous from morning till night. And so officials and the well-connected circumvent the halted condition of mortals by obtaining flashing blue lights for the tops of their cars, a signal that forces everyone to get out of the way, as if for an ambulance. The official blue flashers, called migalki, are often acquired through bribes. And the fantastically reckless driving that goes along with them leads to constant accidents—invariably with much smaller, more vulnerable, civilian automobiles.
Nothing could be more maddening, especially for Russian men, who see their cars as a sign of making it. To be pulled over or to be overtaken is humiliating. Thanks to YouTube and the tactics of flash mobs, a group of furious road warriors started putting blue plastic children’s buckets on their cars—a spontaneous movement that became known as the Society of Blue Buckets. When members discovered that Nikita Mikhailkov, a well-known film director, had a car with a migalka, they lambasted him online.
Ivan Alexeyev, a.k.a. Noize MC, is a hugely famous twenty-six-year-old hip-hop artist in Russia who made much of his reputation rebelling against the entitled class of limo riders. Alexeyev grew up near Smolensk, listening to Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, and Run-DMC. He went to Moscow for college, to study computer science, and he formed his band there, with classmates.
Last year, while he was on tour in the Russian Far East, he heard about an accident near Gagarin Square, in Moscow: a Mercedes bearing a vice-president of one of the major Russian oil companies, Lukoil, smashed into a Citroën, killing two women, including the sister of one of Alexeyev’s friends. The police blamed the driver of the Citroën, but eyewitnesses said that the executive’s car had been driving in the wrong lane, to avoid traffic.That night, in Vladivostok, Alexeyev couldn’t sleep, and he wrote a howl of outrage, called “Mercedes S666.” The song, and the “South Park”-style video that went with it, was a big hit on the Internet. “Right away, a lot of political parties tried to use it for their aims,” Alexeyev told me. “It feels like you always have to choose one or the other, and I don’t want to choose.”Alexeyev has performed songs mocking Russian skinheads and Nashi, the pro-Putin youth group. At a concert in the city of Volgograd, last July, he sang a song about police corruption called “Smoke Bamboo” and made remarks from the stage mocking the Volgograd police for being aggressive. “To be honest, my behavior wasn’t very good, but their reaction was even worse,” Alexeyev told me. He was arrested and jailed for ten days.

Cutting around pieces of symbolism, if tangeantal to the core political problems.

Compare the Cutting and splicing of Media Censorship, and the items that gained the name “Orwellian”, Soviet and Putin-ish:

A week after the incident at the Olympic arena, I paid a call on Putin’s redoubtable spokesman, Dmitri Peskov. Tall and mustachioed, Peskov is a kind of ideal projection of his man; he is wised-up, worldly, professional, and subtly forbidding. When he lies, he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know. The smile is also meant to convey another message to foreign visitors: So, we’re cynical. And you’re not?
When I asked Peskov about the jeering, he unspooled a convoluted hypothesis about how the crowd might have been reacting to the image of Monson being helped to the locker room: “We called him after that, and he said it’s normal that in America when a beaten guy is leaving the hall they often boo.” Peskov, being as skillful and as modern as the regime he serves, then switched from bald-faced nonsense to allowing at least part of the truth. “I also heard some voices, three or four men,” he said. “Someone really shouted out, ‘Putin, go away!’ ”
When I asked why state television altered the sound for replays, he said, “They switched off the noise.”
Yes, but why? I said.
“I don’t know exactly,” Peskov replied. “That was the choice of the editor.” Peskov couldn’t help smiling at this specimen of disingenuousness. And why did Putin cancel an appointment two nights later to attend an anti-drug concert in St. Petersburg? Instead, the Kremlin sent a deputy prime minister, Dmitri Kozak, to represent United Russia, and so it was poor Kozak who endured the catcalls. “Putin wasn’t supposed to go,” Peskov said. “Trust me.”

And your “Hope Springs Eternal” comes out of… where else?The authoritarian features of the Putin era, however, are not like those of either tsarist or Soviet times. “Today’s power is very rational,” Arseny Roginsky, of Memorial, said. “Power today doesn’t shut everyone up. There is freedom of expression and speech. There are shelves of anti-Putin books in the stores. This is no longer the eighteenth century. A book with a printing of a thousand copies will not topple this state.” A strong hand on state television suffices, at least for now.

[…]

Sasha, in his early tweets, focussed on the fantastic privileges of the rich and the powerful. “I don’t understand all this talk of hours-long traffic jams,” he tweeted, aping Medvedev. “Personally, I always get to the Kremlin from Rublyovka in 10-15 minutes.” Masha’s tweets are more literary and cultural in tone, alluding to everything from the films of Sergei Eisenstein to pop music. Sasha and Masha started their Web careers as commenters on the ironical, oppositional invitation-only site called Leper Zone. They never get their news from television, preferring sites like gazeta.ru, slon.ru, and vedomosti.ru, and the tabloid Lifenews.

“When the powers that be check into the Internet, they hear everything, but they don’t listen,” Masha told me. “Twitter is the most interactive of all the platforms.” KermlinRussia, she said, “is a model of a civil-society entity, an example of one, but it is extremely isolated.”

Well…

If Putinism has an ideological manifesto, it is a 2007 lecture that Surkov delivered, at the Russian Academy of Sciences, entitled “Russian Political Culture: The View from Utopia.” The theme, which is pronounced in Putin’s rhetoric, is that there is no such thing as universal democracy. Surkov says that the unique immensity of Russia demands uniquely centralized power. He believes that all democracies around the world are in fact managed and hypocritical, and give only the illusion of real freedom. Like Putin, he insists that the West cease its lectures on freedom and human rights. “They tell us about democracy,” he said at a press conference in Moscow, “while thinking about our hydrocarbons.” At the same time, Surkov is quick to remind liberals that it is only the regime that stands between them and the growing numbers of hard-line Russian nationalists.

That last sentence is familiar with any number of Mid East despots.

At its core, though, Putin’s Russia is not a democracy, sovereign or otherwise. Rather, power for power’s sake and the accumulation of vast wealth in the hands of various “clans” and friends of the Kremlin are at the center of things. Very few owners of the mansions outside Moscow were able to buy those properties, and hold onto them, without close connections, and complete fealty, to the regime. Power has no interest in civil society, save to co-opt and marginalize it.

And, I would go a different route with my “And your system” jab, but…

A smile returned to the spokesman’s lips. “Actually, I was coming here in the car listening to the radio,” he said. “Do you know what was the first item on the news? The State Department of the United States expressed its gravest concern about the policy in Russia toward gays!” Peskov was referring to proposed legislation in St. Petersburg that would prohibit “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism to minors.” He was in stitches now. “I thought, What is the State Department of the United States doing? With their national debt! With their collapsing economy! With a leak of industry in the country because everything is in a financial bubble! With a nightmare in Afghanistan! With a nightmare in Iraq! With a nightmare in the global economy! And they have a deep concern about gays in Russia. Ha! Ha! So I was really in a very good mood because of this!”

Hm. It is all worth a somewhat perfunctory mention in Time’s “Man of the Year — Protester”, after a bunch of other nation’s — I suppose.

Andrew Sullivan: A blogger at I Talk You Bored challenges me to read a Ron Paul letter entitled “Blast ‘Em,” which provides advice on how to shoot “urban youth” carjackers using a disposable, shadily acquired weapon. I’ll respond in due course.

Fantastic! Now that Ron Paul is the front runner, sort of, and thought to be on the verge of a victory in the Iowa caucses, we get to revisit the strange career of Ron Paul, and the “Lew Rockwell wrote those horribly racist things!” defense.

In most standard accounts, Hoover’s career began to turn sour after the war, first with his vicious attacks on homegrown communists, later with his illegal Cointelpro campaign against civil rights and New Left activists. J. Edgar pays special attention to Hoover’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., including the infamous hotel room audiotapes that Hoover peddled to the press as evidence of King’s “degenerate sexual urges.”

What this story leaves out is the equally disturbing fact that much of Hoover’s campaign against King was conducted right out in the open, and with the support of millions of Americans. In 1964, during a speech to female reporters, Hoover denounced King as “the most notorious liar in the country,” warning that the civil rights leader was a danger to the national way of life. In a poll conducted a few months later, fully 50 percent of Americans sided with Hoover. Only 16 percent supported King.

But we’ve entered that moment when a Liberal online outlet requests that when one mentions Ron Paul, they should dutifully link to the story of the newsletters. Though, they could also link to any number of, like, Alex Jones interviews and have the same “Yep. He’s against the War. And…” effect.

Thought of the day. We see the establishment media and Republicans freak about the prospect of Ron Paul winning the Iowa cacuses. And will this be the harbinger of the end of the meaning of the Iowa Caucuses to the Republican nomination?
Just to be sure:
1988 – Bob Dole (37%), Pat Robertson (25%), George H. W. Bush (19%), Jack Kemp (11%), and Pierre DuPont (7%)
2008 – Mike Huckabee (34%), Mitt Romney (25%), Fred Thompson (13%), John McCain (13%), Ron Paul (10%), Rudy Giuliani (4%), and Duncan Hunter (1%)

And Pat Robertson went on to win Washington’s caucses. Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in 1996. And we’re all full of nuts.

The result was that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists came to identify politically with George W. Bush more than any other mainstream Republican politician in memory. This was embodied by the endorsement of Bush’s candidacy by a range of white supremacists, including David Duke, Don Black and Matthew Hale of the World Church of the Creator. This identification even cropped up in odd places like the bizarre neo-Nazi flyers that passed around in Elma, Washington, in November 2000 that proclaimed Bush their group’s “supreme commander.”26

However, the signal event of 2000 that went under everyone’s radar was Patrick Buchanan’s bid for the presidency on the Reform Party ticket. It was this move which drove everyone from the Patriot movement firmly into the arms of George W. Bush and the Republican Party.

Right-wing extremists, for the most part, are only a tiny portion of the electorate; they usually represent at best about 3 or maybe 4 percent of the vote. During the 1990s, these voters gave Ross Perot’s Reform Party nearly half its total base. This was critical in the 1992 election, when George H.W. Bush saw much of his conservative base go to Perot. It didn’t matter quite so much in 1996 — Clinton defeated the GOP’s Bob Dole quite handily, with or without Perot’s help — but the lesson was clear. That 3-4 percent was killing the GOP.

So in 2000 came the Buchanan takeover of the Reform Party. He managed to do this with a maximum of acrimony, so that the party became split into its Buchananite wing — which largely was the white-nationalist faction — and its Perotite wing. Buchanan’s side won the war and got to carry the party’s banner in the national election.

And then Buchanan selected a black woman as his running mate.

The white nationalists who had been Buchanan’s footsoldiers abandoned him immediately. And where did they flee? The GOP, of course. As David Duke’s manager explained it to a reporter: “[A]fter Buchanan chose a black woman as his veep he now thinks that ‘Pat is a moron’ and ‘there is no way we can support him at this point.'” The Democrats — with a Jew as the running mate — were threatening at the time to win the race outright. The combination of all these factors herded the far right handily into voting Republican.

If someone had intended to sabotage the Reform Party and drive its voters back to the GOP, they couldn’t have done a more perfect job of this than Buchanan did. While no one can say whether Buchanan’s moves were made with this end in mind — it certainly is feasible he believed his own bullshit — neither does it seem beyond the pale for an old Nixon hand to take a political bullet for the home team.

In any case, what we’ve been seeing in the field since 2000 is that much of the dissipation of the energy in the Patriot movement is directly related to the identification by right-wing extremists with George W. Bush. The announced reason (according to the New York Times) for the disbanding of Norm Olson’s Michigan Militia, for instance, was the belief among members that Bush had the country headed back in the right direction, as it were:

Yes, but a better way to let the Reform Party die out, to dissipate it into the fraction of a percentage point the party line received in 2000…
… is to not get involved. This is the fate of third parties whose popularity hinges off of a big personality — Ross Perot. Sure, Donald Trump was at the time floating over the contraption, but that wasn’t getting anywhere either.

What is being suggested here is that Pat Buchanan, coming off of disrupting George Bush the Elder’s 1992 campaign by gnabbing a third of the vote in New Hampshire, and then scaring the moderate vote at the party convention with a Hellfire and Brimstone speech… and sending the party into apoplexy by winning the New Hampshire primary in 1996.

… and just barely endorsing Bob Dole.

And, yes, Pat Buchanan believed his own rhetoric. And he found himself a black women who, I recall telling someone with incredulous “She’s further to the right than Buchanan.” From wikipedia.

Pat Buchanan selected Foster as his running-mate after several other candidates such as Jim Traficant and James P. Hoffa declined his offer. Foster, who had supported Buchanan’s campaigns in 1992 and 1996, quit her speaking tour to join the race.
To believe Neiwert, I would have to believe this factoid came from nowhere.

In the 1980s, she became an outspoken opponent of pornography, the civil rights movement, sex education, AIDS education and gay rights and founded “Black Americans for Family Values.” She was arrested in 1987 with several other women while disrupting the state Republican convention to protest its recognition of the Log Cabin Club, an organization of gay Republicans. In 1992, she was a staunch defender of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case and organized a testimonial dinner for Laurence Powell, one of the convicted officers, in 1995.

In 1994, while teaching at Bell High School in Bell, California, Foster was a public advocate of Proposition 187, a California ballot initiative to deny government programs of social services, health care, and public education to illegal immigrants. Her position was extremely unpopular at the school where she taught, which was 90 percent Hispanic. In 1996, after she argued on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that illegal immigration was responsible for the low quality of Los Angeles schools, some of her colleagues at the school condemned her in an open letter. Two days later, she attended an anti-illegal-immigration rally where several of her supporters were attacked by members of the Progressive Labor Party, who allegedly wanted to harm Foster herself. Shortly thereafter, she left her job, which she calls a necessity resulting from her treatment at work. She went on speaking tours for the John Birch Society and took workers’ compensation for an undisclosed mental disorder — which she describes as “stress” and “anxiety” — until her official retirement as a teacher in 1998.

Foster has appeared on The Political Cesspool, a white nationalist radio talk show based in Memphis, Tennessee. She has also been a guest on Larry King Live, CBS This Morning, CNN & CO., Nightline, NewsTalk Television, CNN Live, MSNBC, Politically Incorrect, and various CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasts.

“The Political Cesspool”, huh?

Notwithstanding my dismissal of the “Buchanan sabotaged his third party bid” theory, I do want to see it fleshed out… because… I do think those things can be done sometimes.